Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850

This book explores epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon across Europe from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.

Thomas O. Beebee (Author)

9780521025089, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 March 2006

288 pages, 7 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.435 kg

"Indispenable...The research that has gone into this book is remarkable." The Comparatist

Thomas O. Beebee examines epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon in Europe from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. His study is the first to consider epistolary fiction as a pan-European form of importance to all major European languages. It demonstrates that such fiction can be found everywhere, not just in texts aimed specifically at aesthetic consumption. Beebee begins with the premise that the letter was a Protean form which crystallized social relationships in a variety of ways, and that fictional uses of the letter appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired from its established functions within other discursive practices. He discusses the letter-writing manual, self-referential aspects of the letter, news and travel reporting, the relationship between letters and gender, and historically specific use of epistolarity by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Austen, Balzac and Dostoevsky. The book also offers a bibliography of major European epistolary fiction to 1850.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: letters, genealogy, power
2. Ars dictaminis: the letter-writer in the machine
3. Self-reflexive letters
4. Epistolary defamiliarization
5. The lettered woman as dialectical image
6. A revolution in letters
7. The ghost of epistolarity in the nineteenth-century novel
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]